Reading Like a Professor

I read four chapters of How To Read Literature Like a Professor today. It isn't easy to understand sometimes. Foster uses a lot of words that I'm not familiar with, endless sentences, and a lot of examples from books I've never read. But, I'm doing my best :) In chapter 6, he talks about how often writers use Shakespeare as an example in their works. I thought it was pretty funny when Foster said, "It makes them sound smarter?" when he asked why we turn to Shakespeare as our example when writing literature. It's true, Shakespeare uses sophisticated, profound language that just sounds fancy. In chapter 7, Foster talks about parallels with books he read to the Bible. For example, he compares a young boy from "Araby"(1914) to "The Fall", when Adam and Eve eat the forbidden fruit. In both stories, he finds a common theme: the loss of innocence. Humanity now bears a sinful nature after Adam and Eve's disobedience and the young boy loses his innocence when he discovers that he likes a girl. This comparison and others he used show me how similar all books really are. I learned something from this book, something that her keeps on mentioning in every chapter: Writers use earlier, familiar works into their own. So true. When you read a book, it often reminds me of another familiar story or fairytale I read. In chapter 8, he talks about how writers often use "kiddie lit" in their stories to incorporate familiarity, while putting their on twist on it to make it original. Ironic, huh? haha. That's smart because what kid isn't familiar with Sleeping Beauty or Alice in Wonderland? In a nutshell, I learned that writers often incorporate one or more of three kinds of myth into their works: biblical, fairy tales, or Shakespearean lit. I I'm forced to look up a lot of words in order to find out what Foster's talking about. So, I  learned some vocab:

1. Hapless- (adj.) unfortunate
2. Obscure- (adj.) dim; gloomy
3. Ubiquitous- (adj.) omnipresent
4. Aspire- (v.) to seek to attain or accomplish a particular goal
5. Confer-(v.) to grant

Bye!

Hello There!

How to Read Literature Like a  Professor  Thomas C. Foster


When I read the first couple of pages, I realized that the author, Thomas C. Foster, is very analytical.When I
read the opening example of Kip, who went on a trip for some bread, I was thinking it was a trip. But no, it was much more-a quest.I never thought about it that way. A creative analysis. I really like the author, he's funny at times and gets the point across using examples. Every trip is a quest was his first sentence in bold. Followed by whenever people eat or drink together, it's communion. I mean think about it, why would the author throw in boring dinner scenes without a descent reason. It makes sense to me, it's to show how the characters relate to each other as a community at a shared table. I really like the author's style of writing- pretty colloquial, so that you can relate. I also like the chapter about sonnets, where he talks about what makes  up a well-structured sonnet. "It's a square." Funny. I learned that there's more to it: a 14- lined poem that follows iambic pentameter(10 syllables), ending with a couplet. There's one thing he mentioned that I don't quite agree with 100%- there's only one story. Well yes, you can find parallels between many written works, but are they really that related. Maybe if I keep reading, I'll find out that it's perfectly true. I really like this assignment. I think it's pretty cool that we get to write about what we read and tell our observations online-much better than writing it all by hand!

I learned some new vocab:

1. Apocryphal- (adj.) not genuine; false; spurious
2. Propriety- (n.) the quality of being proper or suitable
3. Convoluted- (adj.) intricate; involved
4. Expatriate-(adj.) living in another country
5. Dynamic- (adj.) of or relating to physical force or energy

Well, I hope this blog wasn't too long. Until next time! :)